Major Additions - Email Integration (New threads/replies by email)

This mod is based off of the Mail Reply modification by Colin F to which I have obtained permission to rewrite and release.

This modification allows you to mimic email lists such as yahoo groups through your forums!

After installing this modification you will have new settings in your forum manager where for each forum you can enable this modification and setup a separate email address to use for each forum that you have this enabled for.

Just like how there is a separate email address for each yahoo group.

After doing so, members can subscribe to each forum that this mod is enabled for to receive notifications for new threads and replies.

Any posts in that forum, will be sent to them via email. (Example email attached below). The users can then reply to that email (which will then be processed and posted to the forums through the cron job that runs every 10 minutes), or they can send a new email to the email address and a brand new thread will be created!

Essentially mimicing an email list! Suddenly those users that hate forums, can still be dragged into the conversations and help keep the forum's activity level up!


BUGS!
These are the known bugs to date:

• Confirmed bug that email processing does not handle Japanese characters.

Unsupported Items
These are the items that are not currently supported:

• Some custom bbcode modifications will not display like they do on the forums in the html emails. Like glow, and the table mod.

TO UPGRADE

• Please see the file in the zip for upgrading!! If your upgrading from version 2.3.X you will need to reverse some file edits that are no longer nessecary!

NEW INSTALL

• See instructions in the zip file.

VERSION HISTORY!
(See the file in the zip for a complete history!)

• 2.6 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Joining an unmoderated public group will now auto subscribe you per the usergroup settings.
    • NO CONFLICTS with Instant Thread Subscription! See details in below post.
  • New Stuff
    • User Option Allow Auto Subscribe - This is an admin allowable, user option that let's the user choose to not be auto subscribed.
    • User Option not receive own posts - A new user option that lets them select to NOT receive their own posts via email.
    • Editted the phrase for the Auto Subscription script to tell people what to do if there are no listings.
    • Added error checks when saving a usergroup for if auto subscriptioin is entered with a forumid for a forum that does not have email integration enabled and also checks that the usergroup you are saing is entered in the forum manager as allowed to use email integration.
• 2.6.1 Release (BETA VERSION)
  • Hot Fix
    • It appears I was unseting a variable too soon. I've corrected this and it has resolved the issue with multiple posted replies on my test server.

Most of these will be slow to make it in til I know I've got the code to handle just about every type of email we could receive But in anycase, here are the ideas for future versions!

• End User Option to subscribe to just receive new thread emails, or receive all new thread & reply emails (current version does all new threads & replies).

Thanks to RedTyger, Bob Denny, Ed Kohwley and Chris McKeever for their additions and assistance with portions of this code.

Huge thanks also goes to the many individuals that have helped test various incarnations of this mod.

MAD PROPS TO: cgmckeever for a great quoting regex for the old format, and all the mods at www.4winmobile.com for helping test version 2.4 prior to release!!

You guys rock!

Please feel free to donate to my continued work on this modification!! It let's me spend more time on it!
Make a Donation!

Version 2.6 will work with both 3.6.8 and 3.7!

The #.X versions are the solid tested versions.

The #.X.X versions are the beta versions. New features and bug fixes will be worked in there and then when I have a solid version it'll be released as the next #.X

Thank you!!

~ Cyricx

[Cyricx]

*shrug*

Personally, I think replying within 1 week is doing pretty damn good

[GlitterKill]

Does anyone know if this plays nice with VBSEO?

[ChurchMedia]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

*shrug*

Personally, I think replying within 1 week is doing pretty damn good

Hey, I'm glad to field a few questions. That's what "community" is all about!

Originally Posted by GlitterKill

Does anyone know if this plays nice with VBSEO?

I'm running VBSEO. No problems.

[bchertov]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

I we just went through the Samhain (halloween) holiday. For most people it may not be a big deal.. but for my personal religion it's our new years holiday

Blessed Be!

My forum has evolved out of a Yahoogroups and this sounds like it will let people post via email which many of my members miss!

Do you think this mod is ready for prime time? Should I wait for the next version?

Thanks for your answer to this and for all your good work that you have shared with us!

Barry

[Cyricx]

Glitterkill -
I had vbseo running side by side with one of the earlier versions and didn't notice any side effect issues at all

Bchertov -
As to if this mod is ready for prime time... that's hard to say. Some are experiencing odd issues with it. Others are having no problems at all! I'm definately working to try to fix those problems as time allows.. but truthfully, I can't give a definitive date on when the next version will be out.

I just discovered that vbmail doesn't like to run from a cron job as an html email when a & is involved.. yeah.. that's gonna be a doozy to fix heh.

But yeah, evolving from yahoogroups was the entire purpose for this modification


ChurchMedia - You Rock!!!

[unitedpunjab]

Hey MOD start working now. And my forum sending mail to every one i forced to subscribe.

But now there is a little bit problem

My forum has around 20,500 + members. And a typical subsection of my forum receive around 5-6 replies every minute. More high in certain hours.

So now when i put that sub forum on e-mail subscription list to all the registered users. It starts sending email on every post that has been made in any thread across that sub forum.

I want a tweak here so that i can set the option to SEND EMAIL ON NEW THREAD ONLY.

Where when some body start a new thread only at that time email system shoot a mail.

Couz u can imagine sending 20,500+ mails every half a minute will take my server down.

[StuartDH]

Originally Posted by doubleclick

ok. got past the imap error. Turns out this error message isn't just about which of the 6 connection type settings to use.

Could you post more info to tell us how you sorted it out

Thanks

[justchecking]

Great mod. Really appreciate all the effort. Will contribute soon. I was able to install and also got email when someone replied. Then when I replied, i was expecting the email to show up as a reply in the thread after 10 minutes. But I have not seen it yet. My question -
Did I screw up something during installation ? I am not still not sure where I enabled the cron job. Does the script have the cron functionality or do I have to enable it in the c-panel of my site.

Does the script only verify with the email address or name also. Because in this case names do not match between vbulletin forum site and yahoo account, but emails match and hence i got the email.

Oh one more thing, in the email I received when someone replied, i see in the brackets - [forumname-t-321] ....is that normal.

thanks.
jc

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by unitedpunjab

I want a tweak here so that i can set the option to SEND EMAIL ON NEW THREAD ONLY.

This is something planned for down the line.

Originally Posted by StuartDH

Could you post more info to tell us how you sorted it out

Thanks

For your host name try, localhost, mail.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com or your IP address for your server. I really want to create a script that will have you input a few of these different variables and then it'll run through a list and try to determine your settings for you. But that is also.. on my to-do list

Originally Posted by justchecking

Great mod. Really appreciate all the effort. Will contribute soon. I was able to install and also got email when someone replied. Then when I replied, i was expecting the email to show up as a reply in the thread after 10 minutes. But I have not seen it yet. My question -
Did I screw up something during installation ? I am not still not sure where I enabled the cron job. Does the script have the cron functionality or do I have to enable it in the c-panel of my site.

Does the script only verify with the email address or name also. Because in this case names do not match between vbulletin forum site and yahoo account, but emails match and hence i got the email.

Oh one more thing, in the email I received when someone replied, i see in the brackets - [forumname-t-321] ....is that normal.

thanks.
jc

It only checks the email address. And then matches that up to your user's email address. So they have to send the email from the same email address that they have associated with their username on your forums.

The 10 minutes thing is based on activity. Vbulletin only runs cron jobs when the forum is active. This is because the variable to run the cron jobs is actually located in the footer template. So if noone is visiting your forums.. the cron jobs.. and the email integration won't run.

Basically.. it'll run a maximum of 10 minutes if your board is constantly active. Otherwise it will wait to run til the next time someone is visiting. The best way to understand this is to open up two windows. One is to your forums. and the other is the admincp, scheduled tasks.

Do this after the board has been quiet for a few hours. What you will see when you first login is a bunck of tasks that are past the time they were supposed to run. Each time you click on a different page on the site, one of the tasks will run that are waiting to run.

[justchecking]

thanks Chris. I finally found that we need to run the cron job manually first time through scheduled tasks manager in admincp. My problem is that when I do that, I get an error
- unable to open the stream. So basically cron script has trouble logging into the mail system and downloading the emails. I tried all 6 settings but no luck.

-thanks.
dslv

Email Integration

Warning: imap_open() [function.imap-open]: Couldn't open stream {mail.mysite.com:993/pop3/ssl}INBOX in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 111

Warning: imap_headers(): supplied argument is not a valid imap resource in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 114

Warning: imap_close(): supplied argument is not a valid imap resource in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1213

Done